Talking about Me
 

These are the people who got me my psychiatric label. These people were once all strangers to me, acting out everywhere with no connection to me at all. Over the years though, I have managed to make many previously unknown connections to those who started all the ‘fun.’

Let me take you all back to the first time I got offered a nice antipsychotic for my ‘delusions’ and what it was, exactly, that were defined as such. Though I have been told a number of times that I am not to talk about it in public , nor ask anyone involved any questions, despite the risk to me, I want to share the loony bin trip with all of you who have spent the last seventeen years enjoying it all as ‘entertainment’ and as a socially sanctioned form of group catharsis. I also want to prepare you for the experience of it as it is becoming more and more likely, that many of you will have this experience in the near future.

Your family physicians have now all been ‘trained’ by psychiatry to watch for signs of impending madness in you, when you go to complain about something like stomach pains, including things like a new disease they have just invented now called “Psychosis Risk Syndrome.”  Be warned then that when you ‘think’ you are talking to your physician about stomach pain and throw in that there are stressors in your life that may be contributory, your family physician may well call out the ACT swat team to take you in for a really ‘good’ assessment and drugging BEFORE you go stark raving mad as ‘preventive medicine.’ So be really careful what you say as it is now all open to ‘interpretation.’ Some people call this psychiatric fascism but of course the psychiatrists just call such people crazy for suggesting there is anything wrong with psychiatry. It is quite handy for psychiatry to have the power to claim that anyone who protests against psychiatry is just crazy for doing so, isn’t it?

But listen, lets’ just get back to me, and my concrete experience since you know how much I love all this ‘vile attention seeking’ according to the judgements of complete strangers that are acted out for me in the streets, (not that an such thing is actually happening of course, and I only say that it is, to ‘seek attention.’) Invalidating Tautology complete. Nifty psychiatric control isn’t it? It is a great job because there is no need to EVER admit you are wrong about anything since all you have to do is psychiatrize it!

The first time I got offered an anti psychotic for my ‘delusions.’

That was shortly after the person to person meeting I had with the unit psychiatrist^[1] who was running the Hamilton units at the time. It was then I told him specifically what my protagonist was doing. This was when I was telling him that the nurse/protagonist was running his game. This was also long before I finally broke down under pressure. This has also been kept ‘secret.' I believe it may have been kept 'secret’ from half of my psychiatrists on the TEAM.^[2] They were already likely in the ‘no one must be blamed’ mode of thinking; “no one” of course meaning the staff, but not me. I can be blamed as you know, for pretty much anything and everything. One of the core group of nurses sat in on that meeting^[3]  basically pretending she did not know much. She was the one who a short time later was alleged to have told the others that if they ‘all stuck together they would be all right as they could not fire all of them.’ This was acted out for me by other staff, which of course they will have to deny and I will have to have it be another in my endless supply of ‘mad’ symptoms which cause me to believe I have been harmed, when ‘really’ I have not been..I only 'think’ that I have BECAUSE I am crazy!

So let’s keep this one relatively short and sweet as I don’t want you to tax yourselves with too much information which will confuse you...not that anyone will pathologize that in YOU of course, since you are among those who can never be blamed, the sane ones, and only do what you do (“covertly”) in your generous and ever high minded attempt to ‘help’ poor crazy me.

When I was sent by the Hamilton unit psychiatrist then across the street to tell of my experience with the staff at the hospital, to a community psychiatrist, I told her of two examples out of that experience, by way of explanation, as to how and why I needed to get this stopped and brought out into the open to be dealt with. Among the things I told her were the following:

That I was being overwhelmed with multiple versions of ‘reality’, nonstop contradiction and that my nurse protagonist was doing an est routine on me and that I could not stop him. (I had already told several others at the psych hospital the same thing and I had told my employer this also.) I told her I needed to get this stopped as it was now involving other people in the community and had ‘taken on a life of its’ own’ no matter what he intended or did not intend it to be. I told her I needed to be talked to directly and openly so that I could anchor to concrete reality which I was then having a bit of trouble doing because they were keeping up the stupid ‘game’ and no one would talk directly to me about it. (This was back in the day when I still thought it was ‘a joke’ or ‘game’ that included me...I still thought he was doing an est routine AS a joke. Now I don’t think I was supposed to recognise it at all as I was NOT an ‘est-ee myself.

As an example of involvement of people outside the hospital I included a train trip I had just taken to Toronto to see my then friend in which there was a group of student aged people who were watching me and talking about me, such as one saying, “Write down every word she says so we can save it for posterity....(and then they laughed) and an older one who seemed to be with them and who was putting on a little performance acting like she was her idea of crazy, wearing a fur hat with ear flaps and looking ‘confused’^[4] while some of the idiots with her looked repeatedly back at me as if to see what kind of a reaction I would have to that.

The psychiatrist said, frowning, “you think students on a train were talking about you?...well maybe just a little anti psychotic to help you with that. I said something like, “How does giving me an anti psychotic help me deal with them?” She looked at me blankly and then asked what made me think these students were talking about me? Had they said my NAME? 

No , I said, they had not said my name but they were perfectly obvious in their behaviour, at least to me. The body language and all of it could not be more obvious and then to top it off one of them held up a small camera over the seat between us and snapped a picture of me. She asked the other one if they thought she had managed to get it.

“You think some students took your picture,” the doctor asked, sounding somewhat alarmed. Do you think perhaps you might be unaware of some other reason for holding a camera?

That was when I made my next mistake by talking as if I was an equal human. I said, Actually I think I am a bit more aware than most people which is why I tend to pick up more information.

Well I think that convinced her I could not be reasoned with on this idea that there was an est routine and that other people I did not know had become involved in it. So she informed me that the est exercise was all over now , offered me more drugs which I turned down stating (because I believed she had actually talked this over with the unit psychiatrist and had accepted the existence of this group behaviour as reality) that I would be all right as long as I knew it was stopped and that the staff there was going to drop it now. She assured me that the est routine was all over now. I was actually being humoured; not believed. Of course I did not know that then. I was used to being heard by being taken at ‘face value.’

They calmed down for awhile at the hospital but then they started the same old BS again, unaware of my awareness apparently, though then they looked to me like they were acting it all out on purpose intending me to see it; talking about me while standing right there, and same guy started up with the stories so I decided I was going to show them I knew what they were doing as a joke or game, and I had to do it without confronting them directly, as I had been told that I could not do so and that it would be inappropriate for me to say anything to them, or to even ask anyone at the psych hospital about it. So this time I responded to it by staying in my own space at all times and played the ‘game’ by repeating everything back to them so they would see that I knew about the game. And they saw too and then I started being watched, followed and reported on and tried to tell them there that it was happening and tell my employer that this was happening but of course they all just KNEW it was ‘all in my mind’. (if you understand the concepts in est now you can see why that would be an amusing statement to the est-ee nurse) Really there was no est routine going on, and the nurses at the unit knew nothing at all about what I was saying, even while they were acting it all out every day, and this was the basis of my diagnosis yet to come; the belief that there was an est routine was just my paranoid delusion. Under increasing pressure, constant invalidation, patronizing attitudes, with amused eyes watching me, smirking faces and rumour spreading all around me, and NO direct genuine communication from anyone, which I had told my employer was what I needed, I finally broke, as I predicted I would, if I was not taken seriously.

I had told my employer to tell the unit psychiatrist that it was the nonstop contradiction, multiple versions of ‘reality’ and psychological isolation in it that was breaking me. They told my employer that they had no idea what I was talking about. Nothing had happened there; nothing. When I got out of the whacko unit, I saw one of them from the unit who was standing in the line beside me at the Bi Way downtown and telling a friend with her, “ ‘that’s her...apparently she was very upset. I guess they won’t be doing anything like that anymore.’^[5] (Like what?) When I got my clean bill of sanity about a month later and could go back to work, I told my inpatient doctor that I wanted to get back into to work there and he agreed.

I wanted to just watch them acting out so I could figure out what the hell had really happened to me there which I was hearing versions of on the streets then too. When I got back in there, my nurse protagonist was very angry. I believe now that this was because he had ‘experienced me out’ as they say in the game, and here I had ‘experienced’ myself back ‘in.’ I ignored him and have ever since. My only interest then was in collecting information about it, for which I am still being mocked for writing it all down,  as I knew I was not going to be able to prove it if I couldn’t. That was when I started to really write all the bits of it down so I could hopefully one day figure out the group behaviour. That process was greatly speeded up when I found the book on est in 99 detailing all the “exercises and processes’ that were done inside the est training. It read like a script for what had been done to me and my actual experience in concrete reality. When I hit page 38, there was a quote from the training that was almost identical to what he had written down for me when I tried to ask him long before what he was doing. “In life, understanding is the booby prize.” They SAID that in the est training. He had added, “Sorry”. When he gave me that in the hospital dining room back in 95 at one point, another employee from my agency^[6], who had been involved in some way was sitting there, so I showed it to her at the time saying, “I ask him what if anything he wants, and this is the kind of answer I get...what the hell is that supposed to mean?’ I still had that paper. I locked it up in my safety deposit box.

Well NOW I know what it means and so I am going to share my experience  “out here, in the world of reality”, just as my protagonist was told he should do with me by keeping the concepts secret and just share the experience of it. I of course, already had the experience of it and now I m sharing all the concepts that were previously ‘hidden.’ That is because as they say in the ‘game’ I choose “enlightenment” over “power.”